Distributed Planning and Scheduling for Space System Flotillas

This paper proposes a distributed approach for planning and scheduling of the on-board activities of a space system flotilla that can achieve several mission goals through their element coordination. Each system is an autonomous agent with an own knowledge base and an own planning-scheduling reasoning capability. The Planning engine maintains a least commitment approach to look for the solution and the Scheduling phase exploits the temporal flexibility during the activity allocation process. Two different negotiation strategies are presented to coordinate the agents during the scheduling process. They emphasize either the team welfare or the individual welfare. A communication protocol to regulate the coordination is also described. Simulation results on a rover exploration scenario are reported.